Caution: Boring Blog Entry

As I was heading toward the automatic door at Super Target today I wondered, as I often have, just who the “Caution” notice is aimed at.
Who looks at the signs and thinks, “Ah, an automatic door! I’d best be on my guard as I proceed!”
First off is the question of what you’re supposed to be cautious about. What is it, exactly, that we should be wary of as we approach the door? Is it going to steal our wallets? Hit on our girlfriends? Suddenly slam shut as we’re walking through and cut us in twain? If they’re really that dangerous, I should think more than a simple word of caution would be in order.
In reality, the worst that’s likely to happen is that the door will fail to open causing you, as you walk along inattentively, to either smack your face or your cart into it and look like a jackass.
And how much of a problem is that, anyway? Odds are you already look like a jackass even when you’re not slamming your face into a recalcitrant automatic door.
Yes, I do realize that in this country we tend to gear things towards the lowest common denominator and take whatever steps we can limit our liability in the event that some litigious moron should manage to get hurt because there was no sign exhorting people to exercise caution in approaching the magic auto-opening door, the sort of people who need to be informed that coffee is hot, ice is slippery, and that anti-freeze, despite looking and tasting tantalizingly like Kool-Aid, is poisonous, but it just strikes me as being rather silly.
The reason I was at Super Target today was that I needed to do some grocery shopping as well as pick up some of the items that I would normally get from Wal Mart.
It had been my intention to get up this morning, drive to Wal Mart, come back and do my grocery shopping, and then return home, with plenty of time to spare before my appointment with the chiropractor.
That plan was shot down by my unwillingness to get up this morning.
I’d woken up, looked at the clock, and thought, “How can it be light out at 4:11…unless it’s 4:11 pm. No, that can’t be; that would mean I’d slept for like 15 hours.”
It was then that I realized that my blurred vision was attempting to report to me that it was 9:11 and that I was just failing to see the line across the top closing the 4 in to make it a 9.
Even so, I was unwilling to get up until quite some time later and decided that I could go grocery shopping after the chiropractor and wait until tomorrow for the Wal Mart stuff.
Ultimately, once I was finally out in the world, I decided to kill two birds with one stone by doing my grocery shopping at Super Target.
Of course, I failed to get most of the non-grocery stuff I wanted, and so tomorrow I probably will actually go to Wal Mart.
Once I’d finished getting all of my groceries I made my way to a register being worked by a rather pretty young woman. Too young, in fact, as school is apparently still out, but hey, it’s not like I was going to offer her candy or anything, so there wouldn’t have been anything wrong with me going through her line and appreciating the fact that she was cute.
Of course, the universe had other ideas. The guy ahead of me (Indian, I guess), was apparently an employee shopping on his day off and was trying to make sure that he took this opportunity to screw over other customers by engaging in some sort of needlessly complex transaction that brought the line to a halt.
After it was finally over and I was able to advance forward, the pretty girl left and some guy (also Indian, apparently), who had been assisting in the whole complicated mess in some fashion, though his assistance did nothing to speed things up, took over cashiering duties for her while she wandered off to someplace else and proved further evidence of Jon’s Third Law of the Service Industry, which states, “Whenever possible, Jon will not be waited on or otherwise assisted by a pretty girl, and will, in fact, be waited on or otherwise assisted by a guy, preferably foreign.”
The Third Law often exerts itself in situations in which it appears that there might be an exception to it, such as today, in which I started out with a pretty girl and ended up with a foreign guy.
In any case, my best guess as to what was going on was that Old Indian guy was related to Younger Indian Guy and was therefore barred, per standard retail and grocery store policy, from ringing him up, which was why Pretty Young Girl was brought in to do it, and then left once the job was done.
Of course, even once he was presumably taken care of, Old Indian Guy kept causing further delays, disputing the cost of certain items and having the price checked and arguing with his apparent younger relation in their native tongue. Eventually Old Indian Guy’s wife chimed in as well.
After a while, wordlessly, Younger Indian Guy started to ring me up, but then paused a few items into it to the process and began talking to Old Indian Guy, who just would not vacate the area. Finally, Younger Indian Guy turned back to his job and got around to giving me a greeting, asking, “How are you today sir?”
I considered saying, “Extremely impatient,” but decided against it.
On the way out, of course, I found myself wondering about the “Caution,” and that brings us back to where we started.
Over at Dvorak’s blog I found this article in which several people look to the future and make predictions about what is to come.
I don’t usually put much stock in predictions that people make – especially when they’re based on idealistic notions – and these predictions are no exception.
The prediction I found most interesting, though, was that religion will essentially be gone within 25 years.
I find this an interesting prediction in that there’s another article our there – which you slackers can find for yourselves – in which it states that something like 25% of Americans believe that Jesus will be making a return appearance in 2007.
Both predictions share the same basic problem: they’re based on wishful thinking and pretty much nothing else.
Oh, I’m sure there are some signs and portents that indicate the return of Jesus, signs and portents that are much more reliable than the signs and portents of every other year in which it was predicted he would return, but what basis is there for the prediction about the decline of religion? Is there any evidence of a decline in religious fanaticism worldwide? Any indicator that people are miraculously becoming more educated and rational and less superstitious? Any indicator that people who actually are educated and rational are willing to give up their faith?
If you consider that hundreds of years later we’re still, essentially, fighting the Crusades, how can you predict a decline in religion? There is absolutely no evidence to support such a claim. You might just as well be predicting that Jesus will return in 2007.
Moving beyond the religious predictions to the predictions about scientific advancement, he other problem I have with most predictions about the future is the fact that economic realities are never taken into account. Sure, there may be some advancement that extends human life and makes it possible for people over 100 to be active and vital, but who are those advancements going to be available to, everyone? Not bloody likely.
The fact that some new panacea has been developed isn’t going to suddenly transform hard-core capitalists into utopian socialists who make their advancements available to the rich and the poor.
Advancements in science and medicine are unlikely to do anything to bridge the divide between the haves and have nots. If anything, as history has shown us, it will actually increase that divide.
Just because you have the ability to improve people’s lives, that doesn’t mean you have the ability to improve people.
The past couple of days as I’ve been feeding L.T. I’ve been noticing just what an assault taking the lid off his tank is on my sense of smell, and I came to realize that it’s probably much worse to have to be actually living in that, so I decided to clean out the tank. I have no idea how often that needs to be done, as the instructions for the tank simply say to clean it “regularly.”
I suppose that when it smells like an open sewer the water is about as clear as the lens of someone with glaucoma, though, that’s a pretty good indicator that it needs to be cleaned.
So I got a small container and filled it with room temperature water, dripped the detoxifying stuff into it, got the net and scooped the fish out, placed it in the container, and dumped the septic tank down the drain, using a colander to catch the pebbles, which I then rinsed off.
I replaced the pebbles and faux plants, filled it back up, detoxified, and dumped L.T. back in.
As I’ve said, I will not take any deliberate steps to transform L.T. into D.T., but I’d be lying if I said that, on some level, I hadn’t been kind of hoping that I might have done something improperly somewhere along the line and found him floating upside down (which would be more than he actually does now) at the end of the big cleaning adventure, but no such luck. He’s still alive and well, hanging out in a corner of the tank and periodically moving over to another corner to hang out.
As for me, I think I need to find another corner of my tank to hang out in for a little while.